The Wallace Collection first opened its doors to the general public in June 1900. To mark the centenary of one of Britain's most beautiful and unjustly (albeit rather pleasantly) underattended museums, this week's choice of picture is The Swing by Jean-Honore Fragonard. It is the museum's most famous painting and virtually its public emblem, which is entirely appropriate. It epitomises the carefree character of the Wallace Collection as a whole and perfectly represents the sensual and slightly risque tastes of the francophile English aristocrat who built it up in the first place.

 

The Fourth Marquess of Hertford acquired the world's most accomplished painting of a man looking up a girl's dress from the collection of the Duc de Morny in 1865, shortly after the Louvre had turned it down for fear that it might offend public morals. So it was that thanks to an outburst of nineteenth-century French prudery one of the most exuberant expressions of the spirit of eighteenth-century French libertinage came to end up in this country.

 

The fascinating circumstances behind its creation were recorded by the playwright, man of letters, Salon gossip and occasional light pornographer Charles Colle. Colle tells in his Memoires of a "most interesting encounter" with the painter Charles-Gabriel Doyen which took place on 2 October 1767. Doyen, whose ambitious new altarpiece for the Church of Saint Roch, Saint Genevieve Putting an End to Pestilence, was at the time the talk of Paris, had recently been approached by the Baron de Saint-Julien to paint a dirty picture. He had been invited to the petite maison on the edge of town where Saint-Julien had installed his mistress. Then the Baron had sprung his request on him: "I would like you to paint Madame on a swing, being pushed by a bishop. You will position me in such a way that I will be able to see the legs of this beautiful child, and even more of her if you wish to enliven the picture." Doyen refused as tactfully as he could, suggesting that Monsieur Fragonard might be a better man for the job. So it proved.

 

In an age when titillating pictures were much in demand, the most unusual aspect of the commission was not its erotic subject but the patron's stipulation that the swing be pushed by a gentleman of the cloth. The explanation may lie in the fact that the Baron Saint-Julien was Receiver General of the French Clergy, a post which required very little of him but yielded much revenue. Saint-Julien may well have meant the painting as a louche allegory of his personal and anything but pious devotion to pleasure. Having the swing pushed by a bishop would have been a way of flaunting the fact that it was thanks to the church that the Baron could pay for such luxuries as his pretty little Sevres porcelain doll of a mistress. In the event, either Fragonard or his patron shied away from this particular detail, although the girl's elderly husband, propelling her from his stone seat in the shadows, does have a naively benevolent and almost priestly air of unworldliness about him.

 

But Fragonard certainly seems to have been highly conscious of his patron's mock-religious conception of the picture because The Swing is a brilliant erotic parody of devotional art. Attended by the secular cupids of her garden statuary and illuminated by a light so dazzling it seems to come from heaven itself, a thoroughly modern goddess of love reveals herself to her awestruck aristocratic devotee. Suddenly confronted by this overwhelming vision the young man reeling backwards in the shrubbery might in another context pass for one of the faithful, witnessing the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. He certainly appears to have entered a state of almost religious ecstasy, except that of course Fragonard's subject is anything but an out of body experience, and if this particular goddess is going anywhere it is not up and away from her votary but down into the undergrowth with him. The ropes of the swing are perilously frayed, and even if she does not fall she may jump. She has kicked off her satin slipper, perhaps as a pretext to join her lover.

 

Fragonard's world is a place of high artifice, the leaves of the trees rendered in dry little touches of paint that recall the shell-encrusted decoration of eighteenth century grottoes. It is an outdoors with an indoors feel to it, recalling contemporary descriptions of the artist's studio as a place full of props including a swing, statues and numerous bouquets of dried flowers. But this fanciful park landscape, which boils over in the background where the foliage billows like steam, enhances the artist's theme perfectly and imbues an apparently trivial scene of dalliance with a surprisingly romantic and genuinely fervent intensity. Fragonard's subject is the irresistible power of a natural impulse, to which his highly wroughtvision of Nature itself excitedly attests.

 

The taste for liaisons dangereuses to which the painter so ably catered also led, albeit indirectly, to the establishment of the Wallace Collection as a free national public museum. The principal founder of the collection, the Fourth Marquess of Hertford, whose enjoyment of the frisson of adultery was not only expressed in his art-buying habits, left all his paintings including The Swing to his illegitimate son, Richard Wallace. Wallace, a rather morally upright character, was so upset by the recurrence of the philandering Hertford gene in his own son that he cut him out of his will. Hertford House, together with all its contents, passed into public property. The family's loss was the nation's gain: a case of swings and roundabouts, so to speak.